Why Now is the Time for Social Media Interoperability Policy in Canada
By Renee Black and Mathushan Thilakanathan
FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
US-centric social media platforms – largely controlled by American billionaires – exert significant control over our digital lives, limiting choice, enabling harm and compromising information integrity. Despite growing risks impacting individuals, communities, and democracies, Canadians have fewer protections and choices than ever. This situation is unsustainable. It also poses a growing risk to Canadian sovereignty.
Meaningful consumer choice is essential to holding platforms accountable. Consumer choice must go beyond current options that enable consumers to download social media data and delete platform accounts. Enabling choice means that consumers must be able to:
Switch platforms and bring their data and networks (i.e. social graphs) with them
Easily adjust privacy settings and engagement preferences aligned with their needs
Curate and control what people and content appears in social media feeds
Enable choice beyond opaque one-size-fits-all engagement-based algorithms
Leverage third-party apps to help consumers manage their digital experiences
Providing consumers with greater choice can help to re-centre consumers and rebalance digital markets by opening up space for alternative social apps and digital ecosystems, including privacy respecting alternative, locally focused applications and social media options that are focused on advancing healthy local discourse.
Why Social Media Interoperability
Canada faces a critical moment.
On a daily basis, millions of Canadians engage with weakly governed US-centric platforms that both entertain and enable harms to consumers and society.
Canada faces pressure to minimize regulations, despite lack of accountability and concentration of power of the wealthiest companies in the world.
Combined with an increasingly adversarial Trump, these factors combine to pose threats to Canadian sovereignty.
Canadians want better choices.
Canadians want and deserve better choices. Making this possible requires providing consumers with more control over their data, content and feeds
Enabling consumers to make decisions means allowing users to switch platforms, share social data, control social media feeds and protect privacy
New decentralized social platforms - including Canadian-originating apps - are emerging and present alternatives to dominant engagement-based apps
Canada has an opportunity to chart a new path by opening up more vibrant digital markets in which alternatives that better align with Canadian values can compete
The problem is BIG (Tech).
A handful of Big Tech platforms – operated largely by wealthy US oligarchs – shape our digital experiences, including on highly sensitive matters such as elections.
Canadians are highly active in dominant US digital platforms with some 30 million Canadians on Facebook and another 14 million on X alone.
Harms and risks are growing, and include harassment, exploitation, mental health, polarization, fraud and child exploitation, to name but a few. This is not normal.
Yet even as harms to children and others accumulate, there is no public oversight
While unmonitored companies continue to accumulate unprecedented wealth and power, platforms pose a clear risk to public safety.
Far from protecting people, platforms repeatedly choose to undermine oversight while systemically rolling back the few trust and safety mechanisms that exist.
They don’t just pose a threat to Canada, they pose a risk to people and countries all around the world.
Because of growing awareness, the opportunity is also big.
As harms from social media accumulate and platforms fail to respond appropriately, Canadians want policies that promote Canadian values and sovereignty.
They want better privacy, transparency, regulation and accountability. They also want better choices that allow consumers to exercise meaningful agency.
This creates an environment that is favorable to policies - such as social media interoperability - that strengthen consumer power and enable competition.
Canadians want more control over their digital experiences.
The most powerful way to empower consumers is to enable them to “vote with their feet” when companies and platforms make decisions that break user trust.
To be meaningful, choice must go beyond allowing consumers to close accounts and delete personal information. It requires providing users with control over their data.
Data control allows users to switch platforms, share data, manage social feeds and protect privacy. It can also deny incumbents the right to retain and use your data.
Interoperability promotes user choice by bringing down “walled gardens” and making it easier for users to switch platforms and manage their digital experiences.
Interoperability can help rebalance digital markets
Canadian citizens, business, and institutions also want better options that address market imbalances arising from the dominance of major US platforms.
Market competition thrives when users can move freely without losing data access.
When switching is easy, platforms must compete on features, privacy, and safety rather than relying on creating walled gardens and high exit barriers.
Interoperability can enable local innovation by opening up new digital marketplaces while lowering switching costs to privacy-respecting and local alternatives
Canada can lead on policy that advances fairer and inclusive digital economies.
Quebec’s leadership on the Right to Data Portability already provides a strong Canadian example on how to implement data portability rights.
Canada can leverage existing policy momentum in other jurisdictions including Utah, New York, Vermont, the EU and Quebec, while leading at the national level.
The Canada Digital Choice Act will provide users with data portability rights including personal information, interactions, content and social graphs.
Globally, momentum is building for policies that rebalance digital markets, strengthen consumer choice, enable local innovation and reduce dependency on US tech.
The Time to Act is Now
Delaying action on interoperability risks squandering a critical moment when political momentum, public sentiment, and global trends are aligned for a reset.
Canada is well-positioned to lay the groundwork for broader and comprehensive reform toward fairer and more inclusive digital economies. This is the time to act.
